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The upholder of Happening must be asked how this false
happening can be supposed to have come about, taking it that it
did, and haw the happening, then, is not universally prevalent.
If there is to be a natural scheme at all, it must be admitted
that this happening does not and cannot exist: for if we
attribute to chance the Principle which is to eliminate chance
from all the rest, how can there ever be anything independent of
chance? And this Nature does take away the chanced from the rest,
bringing in form and limit and shape. In the case of things thus
conformed to reason the cause cannot be identified with chance
but must lie in that very reason; chance must be kept for what
occurs apart from choice and sequence and is purely concurrent.
When we come to the source of all reason, order and limit, how
can we attribute the reality there to chance? Chance is no doubt
master of many things but is not master of
Intellectual-Principle, of reason, of order, so as to bring them
into being. How could chance, recognised as the very opposite of
reason, be its Author? And if it does not produce
Intellectual-Principle, then certainly not that which precedes
and surpasses that Principle. Chance, besides, has no means of
producing, has no being at all, and, assuredly, none in the
Eternal.
Since there is nothing before Him who is the First, we must call
a halt; there is nothing to say; we may enquire into the origin
of his sequents but not of Himself who has no origin.
But perhaps, never having come to be but being as He is, He is
still not master of his own essence: not master of his essence
but being as He is, not self-originating but acting out of his
nature as He finds it, must He not be of necessity what He is,
inhibited from being otherwise?
No: What He is, He is not because He could not be otherwise but
because so is best. Not everything has power to move towards the
better though nothing is prevented by any external from moving
towards the worse. But that the Supreme has not so moved is its
own doing: there has been no inhibition; it has not moved simply
because it is That which does not move; in this stability the
inability to degenerate is not powerlessness; here permanence is
very Act, a self-determination. This absence of declination
comports the fulness of power; it is not the yielding of a being
held and controlled but the Act of one who is necessity, law, to
all.
Does this indicate a Necessity which has brought itself into
existence? No: there has been no coming into being in any degree;
This is that by which being is brought to all the rest, its
sequents. Above all origins, This can owe being neither to an
extern nor to itself.
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